Jeff Vrabel: The value of money

Monday

Nov 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2010 at 9:29 PM

"Why do they even have money?" the boy asks me over breakfast (which, incidentally, consists of an unruly cereal-based mixture he has christened CocoaLuckyTrix, which I let him eat because I'm nothing if not overly protective of his health). And I freeze, my own spoon in midair (embarrassingly, I am eating a cereal that is only one cereal), upon realizing that I have nothing close to a decent answer.

Jeff Vrabel

"Why do they even have money?" the boy asks me over breakfast (which, incidentally, consists of an unruly cereal-based mixture he has christened CocoaLuckyTrix, which I let him eat because I'm nothing if not overly protective of his health). And I freeze, my own spoon in midair (embarrassingly, I am eating a cereal that is only one cereal), upon realizing that I have nothing close to a decent answer.

The boy has been talking a lot about money lately, as he has made the displeasing discovery that in order to purchase CocoaLuckyTrix and Hot Wheels and tickets to Disney World you need money, and in order to get money you need to work, and in order to work you need to go to school, and he is not yet square with this discovery. You can hear steam engines starting and gears whirring to life as it becomes clear just how much swimming and playing and train-set-building time is being given over to first grade for him and work for Mom and Dad, and he has begun making the very salient point that it kind of sucks. It is a nascent, beginner's edition of a midlife crisis, not entirely unlike the one Dad will enjoy in about five or 10 years, and I am blaming it on yachts. (Dad, eventually, will probably also blame his on yachts.)

The yachts, unlike the cereal, are not my fault. We live by the water, so now and again we end up in some marina ogling the boats — though these are "boats" like I'm "Denzel Washington" — because they're big and awesome and because I enjoy using direct visual cues to remind myself of all my incorrect career choices. (Attention, 18-year-old self: Yes, the newspaper may look fun, but would it kill you to take 10 minutes to look into fossil fuels?)

After awhile, we got to talking about one yacht in particular, an obscenely proportioned floating nation-state with one of those nauseating, winkingly dissonant names that's designed to undersell its moneyed girth, something like "Mama's Little Toy" or "Spare Time" or "Choke On This, Teachers of America." I don't know a lot about science, but I'd guess that the Spare Time fulfills many of the qualifications for planet-hood. The Spare Time is easily the largest floating machine I have ever seen that you couldn't launch a fighter jet off of. Starbucks is introducing a new cup size: tall, grande, venti, Spare Time. When economists talk about the income gap between the middle class and the Wall Street-bonus-absorbing superrich, the Spare Time is the most apt floating metaphor imaginable, assuming they haven't finished Cobra Island yet. It’s big, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, after some time, we learn that the boat is worth about $5 million. Now, when you're 6 years old or in Dire Straits, money is nothing, though we endeavor to teach him otherwise. He has, for instance, been saving for months for a Lego plane he found at Walmart. I say "Lego plane" like I'm being blithely dismissive, like I don't know that it's actually called the Lego City Passenger Plane 3181 and sometime last month Walmart ran out of them, and sometime four minutes later I was online buying one in a barely manageable half-panic. I have spent the subsequent two months, needless to say, conjuring a hilarious litany of illogical reasons why we cannot go to the toy department at Walmart and thus learn that the Lego City plane is gone — which doesn't break my heart, let me tell you — and frankly, having already burned through "It's Closed at 4 p.m. On A Saturday," "Freak Flood," "Gorilla Rampage" and "Bombing By North Korea" I'm running low on excuses.

Point is, we're endeavoring to learn, at least a little, about the value of things, although I'm apparently doing a supremely lousy job of it, as the boy is now regarding me and the yacht basically with his hand out, like Let's Have The Check Already, Guy With The Big Nose Who Pours My Cereal. "How much money do we have?" he asks, wide-eyed, figuring, in that amazing 6-year-old way, that somewhere in the attic there is a lead-lined vault that you can't look at directly because you'd be instantly blinded by all the gold. I assure the boy that we do not have anywhere in the neighborhood of $5 million. This is, as you might guess, the wrong answer.

"Well, maybe we could just save some?" he presses, plotting now. I insist that barring some serious improvement in my jump shot, it would take a long, long time to save $5 million, particularly if we attempt to do it while paying the electric bills and eating people food.

"Well, why do they have things that cost $5 million?" he asks, exasperated, "That's not fair." And this opens up an entirely new discussion. I try to reground things, tell him we have, you know, a roof and a car and food and most of the train toys produced domestically in fiscal years 2006-10, and that by most measures that is well above "fair." But fair to a 6-year-old isn't fair to the kid who vacations on the Spare Time and certainly not fair to children on the angel tree, and frankly the more I consider his current worldview, the harder it is to ignore something: Why do they? Kid's got a point.

Jeff Vrabel says this sentence a lot: "Finish your CocoaLuckyTrix, and then you can have some more bacon." He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com and followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.